We introduce the concept of streamballs for fluid flow visualization. Streamballs are based upon implicit surface generation techniques adopted from the well-known metaballs. Their property to split or merge automatically in areas of significant divergence or convergence makes them an ideal tool for the visualization of arbitrary complex flow fields. Using convolution surfaces generated by continuous skeletons for streamball construction offers the possibility to visualize even tensor fields.
The CAD/CAM-based design of free-form surfaces is the beginning of a chain of operations, which ends with the numerically controlled (NC-) production of the designed object. During this process the shape control is an important step to amount efficiency. Several surface interrogation methods already exist to analyze curvature and continuity behaviour of the shape. This paper deals with a new aspect of shape control: the stability of surfaces with respect to infnitesimal bendings. Each inEnitesimal bending of a surface determines a so called instability surface, which is used for the stability investigations. The kinematic meaning of this instability surface will be discussed and we present algorithms to calculate it.
